The American actor Roy Scheider, best known as the hero in the blockbuster Jaws, has died aged 75.

The two-time Oscar nominee died yesterday in hospital in Little Rock Arkansas after being treated for cancer.

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital did not release a cause of death but said Scheider had been treated for multiple myeloma for the past two years.

Scheider was nominated for an Oscar twice: for best supporting actor in 1971's The French Connection; in which he played the police partner of the Oscar winner Gene Hackman; and for best actor for All That Jazz, the autobiographical Bob Fosse film of 1979.

He was best known for his role in Steven Spielberg's 1975 film Jaws, the enduring classic about a killer shark terrorising holidaymakers at Martha's Vineyard.

It is hailed as the film that launched the Hollywood blockbuster era and was the first movie to earn $100m at the box office.

Scheider starred with Richard Dreyfuss, who played an oceanographer.

Speaking to the BBC, Dreyfuss paid tribute to Scheider. "He was a wonderful guy. He was what I call a knockaround actor. A knockaround actor to me is a compliment that means a professional that lives the life of a professional actor and doesn't yell and scream at the fates and does his job and does it as well as he can."

In 2005, one of Scheider's most famous lines in the movie — "You're gonna need a bigger boat" — was voted number 35 on the American Film Institute's list of best movie quotes.

That year, three decades after Jaws came out, movie buffs flocked to Martha's Vineyard, off the south-east coast of Massachusetts, to celebrate the great white shark.

The island's JawsFest 05 brought back some of the cast and crew, including the screenwriter, Carl Gottlieb, and Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel that inspired the Spielberg classic.

Scheider was politically active. He participated in rallies protesting against US military action in Iraq, including a New York demonstration in March 2003 that police said drew 125,000 people.